The Human Element

The Human Element, presented by Wisq, is a podcast hosted by Barb Bidan where CHROs and senior HR leaders share candid stories and practical perspectives on how AI and innovation are shaping the future of HR. In this episode, Barb sits down with Christy Harris, Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at CCC Intelligent Solutions, to talk about leading workforce transformation at a company where AI is both the product and the internal operating model. Subscribe today.

Most HR leaders are navigating AI adoption from the outside in, learning about a technology their company is beginning to use. Christy Harris is doing something considerably harder. As Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at CCC Intelligent Solutions, she is responsible for the full end-to-end talent lifecycle at a publicly traded, Chicago-based SaaS company that has been embedding AI into the P&C insurance economy for 45 years, connecting more than 30,000 businesses across its network. AI is not new at CCC. The challenge Harris is leading now is making it native to how every person inside the company works, not just how the product works.

"AI everywhere doesn't mean everyone becomes a data scientist," Harris explains. "It means that AI gets embedded in how work gets done: drafting, analyzing, prioritizing, so people can spend more time on judgment, relationships, and outcomes." For an organization that helps 50,000 people a day navigate the aftermath of a car accident, that reorientation is both a business imperative and a deeply human one.

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The Power of Purpose in the Face of Change

When the ground is constantly shifting, Harris anchors her workforce in something that doesn't move: purpose. CCC's mission is helping people move forward faster after unexpected events. Every time roles evolve or tools change, Harris brings people back to that why.

The mechanism is simple and consistent. CCC starts every meeting with a purpose story. "When I talked about 50,000 people having a car accident every day," Harris shares, "it doesn't really take much for you to know somebody who has just been in an accident and how that's affected people." For a B2B company working behind the scenes of insurers and repair shops, keeping the end user visible takes intentional effort. Harris makes that effort a cultural practice, not a quarterly initiative.

On communication through change, she is direct: "You have to enroll people into the change. You have to communicate and communicate and communicate and even when you think you've communicated, you have to communicate more." Open forums, psychological safety, and consistent reconnection to purpose are the tools. None of them are flashy. All of them work.

Moving Faster with Intention

Harris is clear-eyed about the pace demands on organizations today. "You do not have the luxury of spending years being very methodical to think through what it is you need because somebody is going to move faster than you." The Fortune 100 graveyard, she notes, is full of companies that learned this lesson too late.

Her framing for staying oriented amid that pace is one of the sharpest in the conversation: fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Staying attached to a specific tool or approach is what causes organizations to miss the next shift. Staying attached to the problem keeps leaders and their teams focused on what actually needs to change.

Leading Humans and AI Workers

Harris raises something that stops the conversation: most organizations are not yet seriously preparing leaders to manage both human employees and AI workers, even though that reality is already arriving. AI workers are being embedded into org charts today. Leaders are expected to provide feedback to them. And nobody has quite figured out what that looks like yet.

Her hypothesis is that the precision required to give good feedback to an AI agent, the need to be specific, clear, and direct to get the output you want, might actually make leaders better at giving feedback to humans. "When they can see that feedback loop with an agent, is there any benefit to that helping them be even better, clearer leaders with the humans that they lead?" It is a question worth sitting with, and one that most leadership development programs have not yet caught up to.

What Harris Would Hand to an Agent Tomorrow

On the practical side, Harris does not just theorize. CCC's HR team is already deploying its first AI worker, and Harris chose the starting point deliberately: travel and expense. The reasoning is instructive. T&E touches almost everyone in the organization, and it is a genuine friction point in the employee experience. Starting there means the impact is immediate and broadly felt, which builds the credibility and momentum that makes the next AI initiative easier to launch.

Beyond T&E, Harris is building something for herself: a custom CHRO operating system using GPT, designed to synthesize information and surface her next best action. Her value, she says, is in judgment, not in aggregating data. "I would love somebody to say, Christy, here's where you're most uniquely positioned. Here's the next best thing you should focus on." She is candid that it is a work in progress, and she offered to share it with Barb and improve it together. That kind of openness, a senior executive publicly working through a problem in real time, is exactly the modeling she says leaders need to do more of.

AI Fluency Is a Leader-Led Imperative

The thing Harris keeps coming back to is capacity. Not technical capacity but emotional and cognitive capacity. "Not just my capacity, but like capacity of leaders. We're asking a lot of leaders right now." Grow the business, adopt new technology, care deeply for teams, make good decisions under ambiguity. The risk of burnout at the leadership layer is real, and Harris thinks about it constantly.

Her answer is not to slow down. It is to build fluency before designing anything for others. "You definitely have to build your AI fluency before designing it for others. This is a leader-led moment, lead from the front." Internal AI adoption, she is firm on this, is a cultural challenge before it is a technical one. And cultural change takes longer than building code.

The HR leaders who will thrive in this period, she says, are the ones willing to get off the sidelines. "Are you going to help be the architect or are you going to be on the receiving end of it?" For Harris, recognized by the Illinois Diversity Council's Power 50 Award and the National Diversity Council as a Top Talent Executive, the answer has always been to step into it.

To hear more conversations like this one, subscribe to The Human Element wherever you get your podcasts.